


you cant save someone who thinks he's not meant to be saved.

by justlookthroughme



Category: The Wolves of Mercy Falls - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Angst and Romance, Depression, Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, blood so much fucking blood its almost a kink lol, hinted anorexia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-16
Updated: 2016-07-16
Packaged: 2018-07-24 10:00:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7504051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justlookthroughme/pseuds/justlookthroughme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cole St Clair used to think that being a wolf was the perfect alternative to ending himself. Now that he got what he wished for, its just not enough to stop the pain of being Cole fucking St Clair, and he's starting to think that nothing ever will be. Not even her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you cant save someone who thinks he's not meant to be saved.

**Author's Note:**

> definitely not my best but i wrote this when i was in a really bad place in my life, and felt like i needed to get it out somehow.
> 
> if you suffer from depression and think you're better off dead, please talk to someone. someone out there is trying to save you. you just have to want to save yourself first. 
> 
> stay strong. keep running.

COLE

Isabel is disappearing. She’s farther and farther from me. She should be. Who wants to come near the big, bad wolf?  
I pace restlessly around the house, the floor beneath my feet pulsing with the deafening music I turned on so loud that they start to fight to be heard against the thoughts in my head. My head is feeling more and more claustrophobic that I was sure I would explode into fireworks like on the fourth of July.  
I am losing her. The failure that I am, I am somehow capable of losing someone I never even had.  
I subconsciously launch my fist into a mirror hanging on the wall, exploding it into a thousand tiny fractures all over the floor the way my head should be. The way I should be. I stood in front of whatever the fuck was left of the cracked mirror and gaze at myself. My reflection shows tousled golden brown hair under the influence of the harsh light, a nose slightly bent at awkward angles resulting from the damaged mirror along with blood from my fists running down the cracks, my father’s sharp cheekbones and jawlines, and my mother’s lifeless dead eyes.  
I look good even in a broken mirror.  
But the problem with me hating my reflection isn’t about what I look like, but about myself. You know the monsters parents warn their kids to stay away from? And the ones kids claim to live inside their closets? And under their beds? The monsters that as the kids get older, start to live and manifest in their heads?  
I am the monster of them all.  
The thought puts a lump in my throat. I never wanted to be this way. I never wanted to be a disgrace. But I guess the thought of being a normal, well-balanced human being has always been boring to me. I was always looking for something more, for some danger, for some thrill. And because living life like a normal human being makes me feel empty and numb, I look for pain.  
Now here I am, right in the middle of it.  
I scream loud enough to wake a small village until I dislodge the lump I feel sitting in there, until my throat feels sore the way it always did after a concert, until I feel far emptier than when I began. I start to choke on my own sobs, but it feels like I’m choking on nothing. I manically start to claw out whatever is left of the mirror, leaving my fingers a bloody mess.  
I am still feeling unsettled and anxious, my bones clattering against themselves as I shake violently. Maybe I need some drugs. But this isn’t a withdrawal symptom.  
This is something else. This is Isabel-withdrawal symptom. This is grief.  
Maybe I need to shake off my human skin and explode into a wolf. This is the whole point of me not killing myself – because I was given the option of shifting into an unfeeling animal when it gets too much. But as a typical failure, I can’t even do that right. My body would not cooperate. It wants to remain human and vulnerable, susceptible to tortures that come from my own head.  
Still shaking and pressing my knees into my chest to keep it in place and stop it from caving in, I reach out for the closest shard of glass. I can hear nothing but my desperate uncontrollable sobs and the loud white noise in my head. Shut up, I tell myself. But who am I kidding? I’m the most stubborn person alive.  
I wish I could be put into vibrate mode – that way, I can be a wreck and fall apart silently, vibrating with my sobs without making a single sound. But what does it matter? No one could hear me. No one ever did. I feel like I’ve been screaming my whole life but no one noticed, no one cared. I could scream to Isabel “I love you” and she wouldn’t hear me, wouldn’t believe me. Screaming never makes a difference.  
Neither does cutting, but seeing the blood…it satisfies me in some way. Clutching the shard of glass, I graze the sharp edge of it along my inner left arm starting near the elbow, and pressing deeper and deeper as I make my way down to the wrist. Along the road, they say. Not across. This way, you bleed out faster and they can’t save you.  
I didn’t really plan to finally cough up the courage to end myself, I was merely going to cut myself and watch myself bleed for a while but now…  
I don’t quite know what I’m doing, I don’t quite know where I will be going once I’m gone, but all I know is I can’t be here anymore. I can’t do this anymore. Any of it.  
Once blood is spilling out of me like an open faucet, I repeat the procedure onto my right arm with whatever is left of me. Then I lay in puddle of my own blood. I am fading fast. My wrists are hideously painful, but at least I know I’m dying.  
In this agony, my mother’s face flashed by me. I want her. I want my Mommy. I miss her. I’ve been avoiding her, her and my father, letting them think I hate them simply because it’s easier than explaining why I had to cut ties with them. But that’s not true. I never hated them. They are generally nice people. But I grew up differently that what they expected of me since I was in my mother’s womb. For this, I resent them. Sometimes, even now, moments away from dying, I can’t decide whether it’s them that I resent or myself. Or maybe I resent them for making me resent myself.  
And then there’s my father. The genius who expects nothing less from me. The thing is, I did try. I tried hard to please him. But he was always asking for more and more, for me to try harder, that I was getting so close. And even though I hate being stuck with only one possibility of living my life – which is to become his clone – I hate the silent disappointment in his eyes even more. So I did as I was told. I tried. Sometimes I succeeded, sometimes I failed. Sometimes I got tired, and sometimes I gave up.  
And in the long run, I was filled with so much loathing. I hated who I was becoming – all my life I swore that I never wanted to be my parents. I didn’t want to be my genius, mad scientist dad. I didn’t want to be my tired, trophy wife mom who did nothing but watch me suffer as my father turned me into a lab rat to see how far I can be cloned into him. Despite all that, they are nice people, and I’m sure they love me. But…I just can’t. They lead an empty, repetitive life that made me feel like I was smothering.  
I wanted more. I wanted to have an adventure and I wanted to self-destruct. If I couldn’t be happy, if being empty and smothered is wired in my genes no matter how far I distance myself from my parents, then at least I will be empty and smothered under my own terms.  
Which is, like now.  
I think of my little brother next. I wonder how he’s doing. My brother I don’t hold so much complicated feelings for. I love him and want to protect him from how harsh I know life could be, but I can’t even look after myself. When I left my family, I convinced myself I was also protecting my brother from witnessing the train wreck that is Cole St. Clair and being collateral damage. But I think it was just an excuse for me to abandon him into the hands of my parents, the hands who would coax him into fitting the shoes that I was supposed to wear.  
I don’t know what they think of me now.  
I don’t know what they think of me now, if they still think of me at all. I don’t know if they miss me. I don’t know how they’ll react when someone calls them in to identify my body at the morgue.  
I was probably dead to them the second I stepped out of the house. But I knew I was dead the day I was born. Maybe I was born to die, even. Maybe I came out of my mother the wrong way, making my head work in a different messed up frequency compared to others. Maybe I came out of my mother with something missing inside me. Maybe I was simply born broken, but complete with a fail-safe. Maybe I should be born with a tag that says “Before the product fails to function and explodes to cause more damage to surroundings, the product will instead implode and off itself permanently.”  
Jeremy probably saw this coming. He always had. He always tried to save me, but I was never one to be saved. I may have rescued myself from the fate of being my father, but even I can’t rescue myself from the fate of being me. As for Viktor… If he were still alive, he would try to save me as well. But that was before my walking-travesty characteristics made me the primary cause of his death. He is probably laughing at me now. Even if he had died human, I’m sure even with his last thoughts he wouldn’t have forgiven me. I could never forgive myself. It was my fault, no matter what Jeremy said.  
And Angela, Vik’s sister? I have hurt her in so, so many ways. Took her virginity. Cheated on her. Dumped her. She would be the one slicing my wrists open today if she had the chance. Maybe I would let her. Her and all the other girls whose hearts I carelessly broke.  
I now realize its taking quite a long time for me to die. Werewolf hazard, maybe. Stupid werewolf who couldn’t shift into a werewolf. But I am slowly going in and out of consciousness. Would Sam hate me? Sam who had gone through far worse in his life, but always struggling to not be a victim of circumstance and try to come out of the other end a better man. The boy was almost killed by his own parents, yet I have the audacity to feel so sorry for myself that I’m bleeding myself out. And what about Grace? Logical, sensible Grace whom was the only one out of all of us who has the most chance of being saved. Would she be there to save Isabel for me?  
Isabel. God. She would hate me, more than ever. Her brother chose to die than be a wolf yet here I am, asking to be wolf and still ultimately killing myself.  
I can feel the blood soaking into my clothes now. I am closer now. Soon all this would go away.  
I don’t blame anyone for why I did this. This is simply the price of being me, of being Cole St Clair. I was always leaving messes behind me for others to clean up. I’m always a mess. I’m a dying, bloody mess. It’s time I clean myself up, the only way I know how. Even if it meant being a coward. I don’t blame my parents, and I certainly don’t blame Isabel. I’m a mess of my own making. But during the very last moments before I fade to black, I keep thinking “Isabel, you did this to me.”

 

   
ISABEL

I’ve been crying so much I can’t even breathe. I am Isabel Rosemary Culpeper. I don’t cry. At least not since my brother died  
I’m made of stone. I don’t have feelings.  
So why does this hurt so much?  
It’s not fair. Why can’t I just be happy like everyone else? Why can’t I let myself be happy?  
The image of Sam kissing the top of Grace’s head made me feel so crowded inside that I think I might throw up. Cole and I never will have that, whatever it is Grace and Sam have. We are never going to be happy together. And as much as I’d like to put all the blame on him, I know mostly it’s all my fault.  
I’m made of stone. I don’t have feelings.  
Or I do, but I can never feel anything the right way. I’m scared. Being happy scares the living shit out of me. I can’t let Cole in. I can’t let anyone in. I hate myself so much I can’t believe that Cole, or anyone else for that matter, could ever love me.  
I’m all alone. Always have been, always will.  
I can never say anything right. I can never do anything right. I keep hurting him. I don’t even know why. It’s like I have to shove off little pieces of my misery to him so he would understand me better. I don’t know how to talk. This is my messed up way of trying to show him what the insides of me look like. Why can’t I just be like other people, for bloody sake?  
But as much as I love Cole St. Clair, I hate him. It’s like I love him too much that the only way to rationalize and balance this out is just to hate him.  
I’m curled up on the floor, one knuckle pressed into my mouth to keep myself from sobbing uncontrollably and the other clutching at my body, where I feel so empty that I’m sure there’s a huge hole somewhere inside if I ripped myself open. Maybe that really is what I’m made of. Just a black hole. Sucking everything in and just let them disappear, until they return with a vengeance and leave me incapacitated on the floor like this vomiting all my sadness through my tears. Maybe I really am just made of empty space. Maybe I don’t even have organs. Not even a heart. That would explain a lot of things.  
I keep crying and crying on the floor. It’s as though if I keep crying, I can cry the pain right out of me, and all the future depressions as well. All my craziness. Like I can get it all out of my system and go back to feeling nothing. But, sometimes I feel everything.  
I feel Jack’s pain as he died course through me a million times, repeatedly, every single freaking day. Every time I hear my mother crying upstairs, alone, I feel my non-existent heart hurting so much that I think I’m having a heart attack. For each night that my father doesn’t come home, I feel that empty space in my chest tear a little wider.  
It’s not just all that, even the little things would rattle me. I look at Cole’s baby pictures and I feel like setting fire to everything around me, wishing if only he could stay that young and happy before he ruined himself. I see the old rug in the living room by the fireplace and I feel like something is crawling and making its way from my stomach but got stuck in my throat, knowing my family isn’t a family anymore. I don’t know how or why the rug by the fireplace connects to us being a family, but it just looks so calm and comforting, the way families should be, and its Dad’s favorite rug and now that he’s gone, my mother would get rid of it. I would sometimes catch Sam and Grace do something as mundane as cleaning out their refrigerator together and it feels as though I’m going to collapse from loneliness.  
I know I’ll never have that stability in a relationship. I’m not being melodramatic. I just know. I think of my parents and the knowledge sinks a little more heavily in my stomach.  
Somewhere along the way, I realize I had stopped crying. My eyes and lips feel swollen. I feel funny and tired, the way I normally do when an allergy reaction makes my eyes and lips turn red and puffy.  
I’m so tired I don’t think I can ever get up from this floor.  
I sigh and close my eyes. Hopefully I can just disappear like this, no efforts needed. I’m done with efforts. The harder I try the harder it bites me back. If I never tried to save Jack, he’d still be alive and my family would still be intact.  
I roll over onto my back, listening to my stomach growl. I pinched my stomach angrily. “Shut up.” I can’t remember the last time I ate. Eating is a complicated concept for me. My stomach needs to be as empty as my soul.  
Empty. Cole’s empty eyes.  
I shut my eyes again, squeezing another tear out of my eye. I sigh once again, stand up with whatever energy I have left, and stumble my way downstairs to get into my car.

***

I pull up the handbrakes, wondering what the hell I’m doing here. Lying on my back on the floor, it seemed like a mindless thing to do – impulsive – to drive to Cole’s house. I didn’t really think of what I would do once I reached his house, and now that I’m in his driveway I feel another version of me – the cowardly one, the messed up one, the I-don’t-want-to-feel-anything one – take over me. I restarted the engine, shaking my head at my stupidity. I drove all the way here to him, and without even seeing him I’m already turning around. Just like I spend all this time trying to be with him, and in the moments where we could probably make it happen, I let my face go blank and pull out the cords.  
I let my feelings go blank and pull out of his driveway.  
But I couldn’t get away fast enough, though. I hear a wolf howling in the distance, from the woods. It sounds so agonizing, so beautiful. The rest of the wolves joined in, a chorus of lonely howls. I am rendered powerless, feeling my numbness shatter to pieces and feel my anguish break through, echoing with their cries.  
Why does everything have to hurt so much?  
I want to tilt my head back and scream with them. Scream until every single window within my vicinity explodes into pieces, until I break the walls I built to keep myself in and everyone else out. Scream until I’m tired and run dry, the way I did with crying a moment ago. And so I do. I scream. I scream and I scream. It does nothing for the pain I feel clawing in my chest. But I scream anyway. The wolves screech with me. I don’t feel so alone anymore.  
And then I realize it: why Cole became a wolf. He just wants to belong somewhere, anywhere at all. Belonging to a pack of wolves is a lot less complicated than interacting with human beings. I begin to hurt for him. For his loneliness. For mine. For every sick thing in this sick world.  
The wolves just keep howling.  
It shouldn’t take me this long to figure out something was wrong. The wolves wouldn’t be howling this desperately if everything was in order. I’ve been around them long enough whether I like it or not to tell the difference. This is them howling to call on a member of the pack. Something like flashing a light to call the missing one home.  
“What have you done now, Cole St Clair?” I snap, shutting off the engine once again and jumping out of my car.  
Is he a wolf now? Lost somewhere, more lost than he ever was? Is he in trouble? Can the wolves sense that when I couldn’t?  
As I run to his front door, so many thoughts are running around in my head but none of them make any sense. There is so much noise in my head that I think I would simply go insane. I don’t even know the first place to find him if he is a wolf. “Cole!” I screeched, banging on his door as though he has paws that could unlock it for me. That is, if he is even in the house. Nothing makes sense. I stop making sense as well.  
I notice the door isn’t even locked. Cole never could grasp the concept of responsibility and thieves or psycho murderers. I don’t know if he understands the concept of Isabel Culpeper.  
My first thought when I got in the house is that it is so loud. The house was pounding with loud drum beats, the floors vibrating with wicked bass lines, and air squealing with distorted guitar riffs. And then there is the vocalist of whatever band this is, howling and screaming his despair. It doesn’t sound as beautiful as the wolves, but it definitely sounds more desperate. Everything is so loud in my head, just screamingscreamingscreaming. And the music is also screamingscreamingscreaming. It’s like he left every single speaker in the house turned on to full volume.  
This, ladies and gentlemen, is Cole St. Clair magnified.  
He is human now. I just know it.  
“Cole!” I scream, louder than I did in the car.  
I run up the stairs to get to the living room and then I see it.  
Everything is a mess. It’s like all the mess in his head managed to escape so they wreaked havoc out here instead. Cole’s house is not new to messes, but this is a messed up kind of mess. I would usually take this to mean that he is a wolf an stuck and terrified in his own home which he fails to recognize, but the same thing in my head that tells me he is in the house is the same thing that tells me he is still human.  
I may not be the most sensible person next to Grace, but I’ve got one hell of an intuition.  
I can still hear the wolves cry.  
Screamingscreamingscreaming.  
I follow the messes of overturned tables, torn curtains and shattered ceramic decorations. Not that much difference than the Culpeper house after a fight between my parents. I feel right at home, with a very loud soundtrack playing in the background, accompanying me in my desperate endeavor to find Cole St. Clair. The thing about Cole is that, if he does not want to be found, it can be literally impossible to find him.  
Drumbeatsbasslinesguitarriffs.  
And then I really see it.  
Cole is on the floor, and something about his color isn’t right. It’s either the lights are too bright or he really is that white. He looks so still. I can’t tell if he is even breathing. Even before I see the blood I can guess what he did. What he always wanted to do.  
Screamingscreamingscreaming.  
If Cole St. Clair wants to do something, it can be literally impossible to stop him.  
SCREAMINGSCREAMINGSCREAMING.  
“No, look at me.” I can’t accept that the fact that I will never see his eyes anymore, his empty eyes. “Cole, please, look at me,” I beg, although I can barely hear myself with all the chaos. The wolves just keep crying in the woods. I can still hear them above the noise of the music and the frantic beating of my heart.  
Screamingscreamingscreaming  
drumbeatsbasslinesguitarriffs  
screamingscreamingscreaming  
“Cole!” I know there is no point talking to the dead. Cole St Clair always wanted to be dead, but he always had been dead. That’s why his eyes are always so empty. And dead people don’t listen to dead people.  
I cradle his face in my hands, my knees in the pool of warm blood on the floor. The cold of his skin makes my teeth clatter in silent panic. But he’s still bleeding. Dead people don’t bleed. Not physically, anyway.  
I can still save him. Physically, anyway.  
But there’s something about his face. He looks so calm, so at peace. His eyes are shut and wherever he is, wherever in between place he is at right now, between life and death, it looks like he is enjoying it way more than here.  
I must really not have a heart because in this moment, I hate him.  
He doesn’t deserve to die on purpose like this and look that peaceful and leave the rest of us like this.  
Screamingscreamingscreaming –  
“Don’t you dare die on me!” I scream, crying again. Cole isn’t really new to being dead, though. He has gone through a few overdoses, died a few times. Emotionally, he has suffered hundreds more little deaths. But the thought of Cole intertwined with death still scares the parts of me I thought were invincible. My hands are shaking so violently it looks if he is either shaking or nodding his head at me. Sure that he’s still alive, I convince my brain to take the next step: how to keep him alive. Thinkthinkthink screamingscreamingscreaming think, Isabel, think, dammit.  
But it was hard to think with all the hysterics threatening to spill out of me. I was always so calm in situations like this but I’m at my breaking point.  
“Damn you,” I breathed, realizing he had slit his wrists down the road instead of across. Vertical, from the wrist towards the elbow. No doctors in the world can stitch that up in a short amount of time. Judging by the amount of blood already pooling on the floor instead of in his body where they belong, he doesn’t have that much time left.  
Thinkthinkthink screamingscreamingscreaming –  
Wolfhowling –  
Wolf.  
I rock back on to my heels, and then sit cross-legged on the floor. Wolf.  
It’s worth a shot, isn’t it?  
Screamingscreamingscreaming  
I race to his kitchen, opening his refrigerator so hard I thought the door is going to come off its hinges. I pray so hard that Cole kept those little syringes of liquid – there are two kinds: one that would trigger the shift from human to wolf and one that would do the opposite.  
God listens to me. There it is, a little syringe lying clumsily in the fridge. I have no idea which kind it is, so I pray again, asking for it to please be the one to shift him into a wolf.  
I run back to Cole and with a trembling hand, stuck the needle into his arm depressed the syringe. Then I wait.  
drumbeatsbasslinesguitarriffs  
Screamingscreamingscreaming  
Wolfhowling  
Cole starts shaking, like he’s having a seizure. His eyes remain shut. I watch as his body starts to realign itself, pulling and stretching, his skin rippling, until a wolf sits in place of Cole St. Clair, in the middle of his pool of blood.  
This wolf did not move either, eyes still shut. But it’s breathing.  
I carefully examine the cuts on the wolf’s front limbs. They’d already stopped bleeding.  
I sigh and I feel so, so tired. I am probably going to just lie and sleep next to him but then he quivered and let out a moan. “Cole?”  
His eyes flickered open at the sound of my voice. Those same dead, empty eyes. Even as a wolf he’s still empty. Broken.  
And then he howled, his misery blending in with the rest of them in the forest.  
I sit there, sobbing again. I feel enough emotions today to last me a lifetime.  
“Cole,” I whispered.  
He flinched away from me.  
“It’s me.”  
His ears flattened, and he took a few backward steps. I know he’s a wolf and he isn’t able to recognize me, but God, this still hurts.  
He makes a noise so full of fear it makes me want to hit something. Where is Cole, the king of the world, who is unafraid of anything?  
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I tell him.  
He just stared at me, looking lost and damaged. The only thing a wolf gets to keep of its human self is its eyes, but Cole gets to keep the ruined parts of him he so desperately wants to lose.  
“Why? Why did you do this?”  
Screamingscreamingscreaming  
“You didn’t have to do this.”  
Cole howled again with the rest of them.  
Wolfhowling  
I have never felt more alone in my entire life of loneliness.  
I stand up, walk down the stairs, and open the door. Once the smell of the woods hits his nose, he is out the door.  
And me? I have to let him go.


End file.
